My new corner of the blogosphere.

Welcome to my new little corner of the blogosphere!

I’m very excited to start on this new (writing) adventure, and I can’t wait to see how this little blog will grow and change as I begin posting, and our little blog family here grows!

I have quite a few plans for the future, including a giveaways to celebrate the launch, but for today’s first (introductory) post, I wanted to explain a few things: Why I’m leaving Second Breakfast behind and starting Joy Runs Deeper, where the idea for the new blog came from, and what you can expect to see coming up!

Why I’m starting a new blog.

My old blog became stale quite awhile ago, and while I didn’t want to quit blogging, I was at a loss for what to do.

I kept wanting to start fresh, with a new strategy, a new goal for the blog, but I never really did–every time I sat down to come up with some way to get back into blogging again, I just couldn’t make it fit in with the blog. So I started talking to my sister about it, saying I want to start again, do you think I should just delete the old posts? Shut it down for a month, come up with new content? What can I do to refresh, and start blogging again, better? And she asked me a simple question that I hadn’t thought of before:

“Have you thought of completely rebranding, with a new blog, a new name?”

I never had. I didn’t want to go through the hassle of setting up a new site, getting a new domain name, much less naming the whole thing! (*sigh* I tend to be terrible at naming anything that isn’t an easily-nameable animal.) But the more I thought about it, the better the plan seemed–after all, the ‘hassle’ of setting this up was also an opportunity. An opportunity for me to completely re-design, to start a new blog with newsletters, giveaways, pages and posts already done and just ready to be published.

And once I started thinking about re-naming, I knew right away what the name had to be!

Why I chose ‘Joy Runs Deeper’.

This summer while I was studying abroad in Europe, I read Corrie ten Boom’s book, The Hiding Place. And a phrase she wrote really stuck out to me: “Joy runs deeper than despair”. I finished the book the day that we went to visit Auschwitz, and her story, of how she and her sister helped others during the war, and went to a concentration camp because of it but still continued to bring hope and joy to those around them, how they glorified God through all of their experiences, was inspiring. I will never forget it.

Another phrase that came back with me from my summer abroad was again, very simple, from studying The Lord’s Prayer in our Bible class, and my relating a verse to something Jesus said before being captured and hung on the cross: “Yet not my will, but Your will be done”.

These two phrases helped me to grow deeper in my faith, and analyze the struggles I was going through. They also helped me to establish a goal for the future: To remember that Joy always runs deeper than whatever else we are feeling, and that His will is better than ours, even though it may not feel like it at the time.

“Joy runs deeper” is a phrase that I have set up as a goal. I want to remember that no matter what we go through, good or bad, our joy in Him should be deeper still. So joy runs deeper than despair, happiness, anxiety, or apathy. Joy runs deeper than all of this, and much more.

A favorite photo from Venice–a narrow little canal.

What you can expect in the future.

My goal is to publish posts twice a week during the school year, and thrice a week during breaks, as well as every Saturday I will be publishing simple, fun, social posts, called Joy and Java! If you were a subscriber at Second Breakfast, then first of all, thank you! Some of my favorite and most well-received posts will be published again here, after editing, et al, but most of the content will be new, and I hope you enjoy it.

I would also urge you to subscribe, on the sidebar to the right, and visit this page to learn more about how you can get involved, and give feedback on what topics you want to read about!

Also. . . giveaways!

I’m working on a series of awesome giveaways/reviews with some wonderful Etsy sellers for the launch, and those will be coming soon! I’ll also be posting bookish social media giveaways, so follow along on Instagram and don’t miss out! (You can also see sneak peeks of the upcoming giveaways here.)

The blog family.

Although I’m the only one writing on this little blog, I consider this to be an opportunity to grow it into a blog family. I love hearing back about what posts have impacted you, what your experiences have been, and recommendations and requests–about books, blog posts, travel stories, new recipes, you name it!

So jump on the bandwagon. Let me know what you want to read about on this new blog. Connect with me on social media. Give me book recommendations. Chat with me.